Or can it?

Are we re-living the 1930s?

It's a popular topic in social media, and at LitHub today:

For this reason, It Can’t Happen Here presents a strange sort of dystopian mirror (as Malcolm Harris suggested in Salon last September), reflecting, across the distance of 80 years, both the fissures of its epoch and of ours. The saga of a willful know-nothing, Senator Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, who sells his ignorance as political capital, it is part satire, part cautionary narrative, a projection of a future that felt—it must have—much too close at hand. Backed by the Coughlin-esque Bishop Prang and offering, like Long, a $5,000 handout to every citizen, Windrip wins the Democratic nomination for president, then easily defeats his Republican counterpart, Senator Walt Trowbridge, as well as Roosevelt, who runs as an independent. No sooner is he the nominee than he issues “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men,” with proposals including the regulation of unions “against the menace of destructive and un-American Radicalism”; restrictions against atheists, agnostics, Jews, African-Americans, and women; and amendments certifying that “Congress will serve only in an advisory capacity” and “the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed form its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President.”
Outrageous, right? Maybe not so much anymore, in a political climate where the Republican frontrunner openly endorses a wall along the Mexican border and a national registry of Muslims while calling a journalist a bimbo and retweeting revealing photos of her on his Twitter feed. It’s enough to make you doubt the credibility of progress, to imagine that we as a nation—as a species—are moving backwards rather than ahead. This is where It Can’t Happen Here becomes most resonant, reminding us that the push-and-pull between progressivism and nativism is, as Jon Meacham noted recently on Real Time, “the oldest American argument,” going back to the Constitutional Convention and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Here’s how Lewis frames it: “What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it’s only a pipe dream! … I’m not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don’t want all this high-brow intellectuality, all this book-learning. … No, what we all of us must have, if this great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the Congress of Nations, is Discipline—Will Power—Character!” The speaker is a member of the D.A.R. who has sought to ban from the movies anyone who had “(a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country—except Great Britain … or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions.” 

Such hyperbole is of a piece with Lewis novels such as Babbitt or Elmer Gantry, which satirized not only American hypocrisy but also American idiocy. In that sense, Windrip is one in a long line of the author’s protagonists: self-promoters and snake oil salesmen marketing their own ambitions as emblematic of the common good. If he’s not quite at the level of his antecedents—It Can’t Happen Here is minor Lewis, written quickly, five months from inception to publication, and responsive more to particular circumstance than to a general sense of America as self-aggrandizing booster culture—it gets at something less ironic, more sinister, that quality of nativism once again. 

This is where Donald Trump and Ted Cruz come in, with their sense of nativism as morality. In the closing days of the Iowa campaign, both of them, as well as Marco Rubio and Ben Carson, courted evangelical voters: “Christianity is under tremendous siege,” Trump declared in Sioux City, promising to bring back “Merry Christmas” as a greeting for the holidays. As to how he might achieve this, it doesn’t matter; the promise is the thing. “[T]he greatest moral threat we’re facing is the assault coming from Washington, the media, and Hollywood,” Cruz claimed in November, a month or so before he zeroed in on “New York values” as a defining, and divisive, thread. Moral threat? Whose moral threat? Don’t look too closely or you may not like what you find. “We can go back to the Dark Ages!” a character declares in It Can’t Happen Here. “The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin!” That is the key to Windrip (as Malcolm Harris explored in his piece for Salon, last fall): he’s plain-spoken, a common man for common men, presenting his prejudice as common sense, what the people know and want to hear...